Someone please convince me why I should hate systemd because I still don't understand why all the hate exists.
The idea as far as I can tell is that it's responsible for too many things and gives a massive point of failure.
The Linux kernel (the part that gives Linux the name) is antithetical to Linux philosophy? I could understand it being contrary to GNU philosophy
Does it ? I thought it was never completed !
On the other hand, if you want a microkernel that does exist, there’s Mach. But I don’t think you can replace Linux with it 😆
In some ways I think the filesystem is philosophically the exact opposite of systemd --- I can boot my system with an ext4 root, with a btrfs /home...or vice versa. Or add some ZFS, or whatever. The filesystem is (with the exception of some special backup schemes) largely independent of the rest of the system, despite being of core importance.
On the other hand, I can't change my init system (i.e., systemd) without serious, serious work.
It's also "infectious" software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn't all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments.
https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/
This isn't a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.
Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn't immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
It's more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they're forced to use doesn't even respect their concerns, they're going to start rejecting the tool.
What do you expect from an init system? It's like saying my cpu is infectious because my computer depends on it
It's that it also decided to take over log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution, etc, etc.
If it were just an init system that would be perfectly portable. People were able to write software that way with sysv for years.
It's that in order to do certain low level tasks on a systemd system, you need to integrate with systemd, not just "be started by it". Now if a distro wants that piece of software, it needs to use systemd, and other pieces of software that want to be on that distro need to implement integration with systemd.
A dependency isn't infectious, but a dependency you can't easily swap out is, particularly if it's positioned near the base of a dependency tree.
Almost all of my software can run on x86 or arm without any issues beyond changing compiler targets. It's closer to how it's tricky to port software between Mac and Linux, or Linux and BSD. Targeting one platform entails significant, potentially prohibitive, effort to support another, despite them all being ostensibly compatible unix like systems.
log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution
and this is a bad thing? the distro can choose to not use it, but because every systemd distro uses it, it's a 1000x easier to implement it without needing to put a fuck tons of if-else's for every distro
No, not everyone thinks it's a bad thing. It is, however, infectious, which is a reason some people don't like it.
Knowing why people dislike something isn't the same as thinking it's the worst thing ever, and liking something doesn't mean you can't acknowledge it's defects.
I think it's a net benefit, but that it would be better if they had limited the scope of the project a bit, rather than trying to put everything in the unit system.
and what's the problem?, it's not like everything is in the same binary or it's a monstrosity that can't be used without using every single feature, it's a project that just has different programs under the same project name, because no one wanted todo theoe programs
That’s why I personally try very hard to only rely on POSIX stuff, even when it’s massively inconvenient. The only thing I haven’t gotten around to replacing yet is GNU make.
Bro I’m with you on this but the systemd bots will just keep arguing with and downvoting you. Don’t bother.
I think the init system is the best part of systemd. It is sooo easy to use. You don't have to write the same complicated shell script for your software like everyone else. You just give systemd the path to your executable and that's basically it. It does the rest and you don't have to worry about PID files or forking the actual software. Systemd basically runs it like you did while developing it.
I think what people don't like are all the other parts of systemd that seem to be tightly coupled. I don't know if it is even possible to run just the systemd init without any other systemd package.
The last time I got angry at systemd was when resolvd did some DNS shit I did not approve of.
I may be wrong but I believe that all of the systemd programs are decoupled. You can run the systemd init system without any resolved or networkd. They just happen to be used by default on a lot of distros.
I expect it to not run a stop job for 90 seconds by default every time I want to quickly shut down my laptop. /s
it doesn't run a job it waits for your jobs to end. You can set the default want time. Its the same thing on windows that asks programs to close before shutting down. If a critical application got stuck systemd has nothing to do with it
I know what it is. But it literally says "A stop job is running" and since english is not my first language, I had no good idea how to better express the technicalities of it in a short sentence.
As for it having nothing to do with systemd:
I am dual booting arch and artix, because I am currently in the middle of transitioning. I have the exact same packages on both installs (+ some extra openrc packages on artix).
About 30% of the shutdowns on arch do the stop job thing. It happens randomly without any changes being done by me between the sessions.
0% of the shutdowns on artix take more than 5 seconds.
I know that I can configure it. But why is 90 seconds a default? It is utterly unreasonable. You cite windows doing it, but compare it instead to mac, which has extremely fast powerups and shutdowns.
And back to the technicalities, openrc doesn't say "a stop job is running", so who runs the stop job if not systemd?
The question you should be asking is what's wrong with that job which is causing it to run for long enough that the timeout has to kill it.
Systemd isn't the problem here, all it's doing is making it easy to find out what process is slowing down your shutdown, and making sure it doesn't stall forever
the develope receive a fuck ton of hate too, and he keep the project going, against every one unix-way haters
Well, I don't give him too much credit for that given that it was his day job, not some passion project.
Most of the hate towards him was because he took an abrasive stance against anyone who disagreed with him, or pointed out bugs.
Indeed, the Unix philosophy was do one thing and do it well. ls just list directory’s and files it’s not a network manager too. Systemd crams a lot of extra shit into an init.d/rc.
I still prefer the old system-v/openRC setup or BSD’s setup. It’s simple does 1 job and does it well. But I can work with systemd just fine in creating scripts these days and it does have some nice features like user startup scripts baked into it and podman integrates very nicely with it.
My understanding is that some people are die hards to the software philosophy of "do one thing really well". systemd at the very least does many different things. These people would prefer to chain a bunch of smaller programs together to replicate the same functionality of systemd since every program in the chain fits the philosophy of "does one thing really well".
For me it’s 3 things
Systemd breaks all three of though by being monolithic and binary. It actually makes you have to jump through more hoops to do things in certain cases. I understand it’s a mindset shift but it really starts making it feel more like Windows with how it works and the registry and event log.
I don't see how systemd has anything like the Windows registry. At least its journals are leagues ahead of Windows event logs, I hate those things and the awful viewer they have.
You forgot: use as many dependencies as you need. For example, my init system does not use xz-utils.
People don’t like it because it’s declarative. It felt cool to be able to just put bash files into certain directories to have them executed on startup. That was elegant, in the sense of “everything’s a file”.
systemd is more of an api than a framework, so it’s a different design paradigm.
I hated systemd until I printed out the docs, for some coffee, and sat in a comfy chair to read them front to back. Then I loved it.
Mostly I hated it because I didn’t know how to do things with it.
Also, “journalctl” is kind of an ugly command. But really, who gives a fuck. It’s a well-designed system.
And if a person absolutely must execute their own arbitrary code they can just declare a command to execute their script file as the startup operation on a unit.
Your comment summarizes my entire programming career.
These steps:
Be taught that there's a specific way to do something because the other ways have major issues
Find something that goes against that specific way and hate it
After a lot of familiarity, end up understanding it
Have a mix emotion of both loving it because it functions so well and hating it because it doesn't align with the rules you've set up
Developer cognition is the most expensive resource on any programming project. It is entirely rational to stick to tried and true ways of doing things. A developer’s mind is generally at capacity, and putting some of that capacity into learning new tricks comes at the cost of all the other things that developer can be doing.
And it’s not just a matter of time. Generally speaking, a developer can only do so much mental processing between sleep cycles.
That’s not to say it’s always bad to learn new things. In fact one has to in order to keep the system working in a changing world.
But throwing shade at developers who hesitate to learn new things is foolish. I’d recommend every developer do shamatha and vipassana meditation so that they can more accurately monitor the state of their own mental resources. Those mental resources are the most valuable and most expensive resources on the project.
Good that you've enjoyed it. But a fundamentally wrong thing about systemd is that it is actively harming the best thing about Linux – freedom. Some programs won't work on a non-systemd distro because how tightly coupled and vendor non-agnostic anything that becomes dependent on might become at times. Of course it's not as bad as glib(loat)c, but still if something can be done without any degradation of functionality via standard POSIX facilities, WHY either incur additional maintenance overhead for non-systemd implementations or punish people for their computing choices if there's no one to maintain it?
I don't hate systemd. However:
Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.
That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.
I don't hate it now, though I did when it first came out, as it borked my system on several occasions. I'm still not a fan, but it works so eh.
One borkage was that the behavior of fstab changed, so if there was e.g. a USB drive in fstab which was not connected at startup, the system would refuse to boot without some (previously not required) flags in fstab. This is not a big deal for a personal laptop, but for my headless server, was a real pain. The systemd behavior is arguably the right one, but it broke systems in the process. Which is somewhat antithetical to, say, Linus Torvalds' approach to kernel development ("do not break user space").
It also changed the default behavior of halt --- now, it changed it to the "correct" behavior, but again...it broke/adversely affected existing usage patterns, even if it was ultimately in the right.
In addition to all of this, binary logs are very un-UNIXy, and the monolithic/do-everything model feels more like Windows than *NIX.
systemd tries to unify a Wild West situation where everyone, their crazy uncle, and their shotgun-dual-wielding Grandma has a different set of boot-time scripts. Instead of custom 200-line shell scripts now you have a standard simple syntax that takes 5 minutes to learn.
Downside is now certain complicated stuff that was 1 line need multiple files worth of workarounds to work. Additionally, any custom scripts need to be rewritten as a systemd service (assuming you don't use the compat mode).
People are angry that it's not the same as before and they need to rewrite any custom tweaks they have. It's like learning to drive manual for years, wonder why the heck there is a need for auto, then realizing nobody is producing manual cars anymore.
There is also the argument that it's more complicated under the hood and harder to troubleshoot, particularly because of it's inherent parallelism and dependency-tree design, whereas initv was inherently serial. It was much more straightforward to pick the order in which services started and shut down on an initv system.
For example, say I write a service and I want it to always be the first service stopped during a shutdown, and I want all other services to wait for it to stop before shutting down. That was trivial to do on an initv system, it's basically impossible on systemd.
For those wondering, yes I did run into this situation. My solution was clobbering the shutdown, poweroff, and restart binaries with scripts earlier in path search that stop my service, verify that they're stopped, and then hook back to systemd to do the power event.
I had numerous situations where systemd didn't let me abort a hanging service startup during boot or stop during shutdown.
So what do I do now, systemd? Wait till infinity??
That never happened while using other init systems. Because they simply fail properly ("sorry I did my best to stop this, I needed a SIGKILL finally"). Or simply let me log in: "sorry, some services failed to start and now it's a huge mess, but at least you can log in and fix it.".
Ever seen a log file be a binary file, not text?
Ever seen an init system that was also cron?
Do you want to be forced to use a specific init system in order to use udev?
Then SystemD is for you!
"I am a new linux user. After 15 minutes of research on google, I found a few forum posts and some niche websites that said SystemD was bad, so I took it as gospel. Now my system doesn't work as simply as it did with installer defaults? How do I make everything Just Work™ after removing any OS components I don't understand the need for?"
I mean you essentially just highlighted a primary user experience problem with Linux....
Information & advice is fragmented, spread around, highly opinionated, poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.
And then the other part of it is that a large part the Linux community will shit on you for not knowing what you don't know because of some weird cultural elitism...
When you finally ask for help once you realize you don't know what you're doing, you're usually met with derisive comments and criticism instead of help.
Do you want Linux to be customizable so that users can control it however they want. Or do you want it to be safe so that users don't mess it up? You can't have it both ways, and when you tell users to "go figure it out" and then :suprise_pikachu: that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what's good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
It's the biggest thing holding Linux desktop back.
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Manjaro all have docs and wiki on their primary websites. Slackware has docs, Gentoo has a wiki. Anything that's not on a distro's site needs to be carefully considered before tampering. Almost all of those distros have a warning in their installation instructions to only listen to the information in their docs and wiki, and to a lesser extent their forums. Hell, even nosystemd.org tells you what systemd is, what it's for, what replacements there are, and the proper way to get rid of it in bold text under the header "How do I get rid of systemd?"
Listening to hackneyed advice from unvetted sources just because they have strong opinions is a problem that any and every computer will face. That's not a problem with linux anymore than the hoardes of trolls on random social media sites telling you to "delete System32" is a problem with Windows.
I want Linux to be customizable AND safe. But safe in the way that someone takes the time to learn how what they plan to do will effect their system, not safe in the sense of "impossible to bork"
As for elitism: if it's "elitist" to indirectly poke fun of someone who deleted a core system component without understanding what it does without a backup, then so be it. It feels more like that word is levied by people whose ego is too big to take respobsibility for the mistakes they made, and instead blame others for laughing when it bites them in the ass.
Idk where these swaths of elitists that refuse to help are. OOP went to stackexchange and likely got a helpful answer complete with explanations, as that is the community standard. Over on !linux@lemmy.ml , I see people offering help with problems all the time without shitting on them. If I go to the aforementioned OS forums, or really any software-specific forums, I see people helping or pointing people to where they can get help.
And I'm not denying that assholes who say shit like "did you even bother googling?" exist. They're nasty people with no patience, but they're by no means the community standard unless they're the only ones you pay attention to...
Or unless you see a screenshot of a question from a different website posted in a meme-sharing forum and expect the comments to offer advice, instead of laughing at the person who shot themselves in the foot and went to a hospital instead of seeking help at the DNC HQ
The cultural elitism comes from years of tinkering with their system since all the information they can find is fragmented and spread around, highly opinionated,’poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.
I feel this in my soul, except about Windows. I've got a handful of machines at work that refuse to update to Windows 10 22H2. They give an error code during the compatibility check. Googling that error code returns dozens of forum posts with hundreds of users and "Microsoft support agents" chiming in. They give the same list of suggestions—that don't work—to fix it. Nobody can say what the error code means, or what the compatibility check checks. The official Microsoft fix is to reinstall.
I don't want to reinstall. The suite of software these computers run would take several hours to reinstall.
This is typical of my experience with Windows. (I'm a Unix/Linux guy.) I look up how to do something in Windows, and with the official Microsoft documentation, one of three things inevitably happens:
One time, when trying to get Excel to run a mail merge, I ran into all three problems in three attempts.
The same happens with 3rd party sites. They never say the edition of Windows to which their guide refers, and the feature is deprecated or gone. (Most recently it was about getting a Windows 10 start menu behavior back on 11.)
Oh, and since Windows is mainstream, a lot of the information is in the form of AI vomit, and covered in ads and dark patterns.
Its not because you're a linux main that this doesnt make sense, its because windiws has soent the last 10 years enshittifying in order to try and take Apple's walled garden. Once my desktop dies, I'm never going back to Windows, and tbh, if I scrounge up enough to buy a second tower before that, I'm installing linux on that tower, transferring my files over, and then installing linux on my current tower as well
To be fair, Windows and Macos support is like this too. Its random forum suggestions from even less technical people.
The distros official resources are comprehensive and don't have the issue of being outdated and fragmented.
Debians official resources are often outdated, fragmented and not comprehensive in the slightest. I had to scour email list and random blog post if I had to deal with some Debian tooling problems. It's only saving grace, is that it fairly widespread, and that there are these random blog posts.
Except the principles behind linux aren't "being able to customize however you want", that's the principle behind certain distros like Arch. Linux is about being free and open-source, so nobody is beholden to a single entity making sweeping changes that are bad for the community but good for their bottom line.
that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what's good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
I don't think anyone's seriously shitting on nooby mistakes, because everyone has done something stupid like that and learned a lesson from it. It's kind of a "cute noob" moment
This isn't a Linux problem this is a society problem people just want to one up everyone In anyway they can and sometimes I dont think we do it consciencely
It turns into a Linux problem when it holds back Linux desktop adoption by creating a difficult or even toxic environment for new, low-technical or non-technical users.
IMO that's not what is holding back Linux from adoption. there are great forums with great people and they happen to be in the distros for beginners. You can use your argument with any small enthusiasts groups and that was my point toxicness is not caused by Linux. I personally believe its windows and Mac forcing themselves on people. Have you ever been to a store to buy a computer and someone said hey would you like to try this free OS that installs and acts just like windows instead of buying windows for 100 bucks? Lol its just marketing.
Not trying to start an argument here but I do want to point out that your argument foundations on blaming other competitors instead of looking at what can make the platform you're passionate about more palatable.
There are many, MANY, reasons people will choose Mac and windows on their own accord.
Your argument hand waves that away to make a boogieman out of mac and windows, and erodes the true viability of Linux as a platform by not looking at how it can improve, and instead focusing on how the competition "is bad".
Taking the ego stance that Linux "would be great if it wasn't being held back by the bad guys" doesn't actually help Linux desktop adoption...
The problem is linux is palatable there are many distros that are prebuilt to run like a Mac or windows they just have no way of marketing like Microsoft or apple.
that is because of the Open source licences. If they were able to sell their product do you think linux would be as far behind as it is today?
If those thousands of companies that use linux every single day had to pay a sub fee instead of measily (tax writeoff)donations do you think think XZ would have been hacked? If they could compete in the capitalist race would they be this far behind? IMO no and the open source license is a blessing and a curse
I agree both windows and Mac were once great viable OSes now they are just an advertising machine with apps
linux distros have been held back not by those companies specifically but with how licensing works its really fucked any sort of fulltime development
a company telling me that my perfectly working hardware is not viable for their new OS and not giving me an option with security updates is a boogieman IMO
Can confirm I am a Linux lurker who would love to learn all this cool shit but right now I don't have the time/mental fortitude to wade through all the bullshit and experiment. I already do that enough with power platform at work and I know that I know nothing. It's exhilarating and tiresome. It would be great if we could have some "training wheels" type of community on here to help new users out.
Cool thing is, GPT fixes all the problems with elitist gatekeeping assholes, whether on stack exchange or something random Linux forum. It truly democratizes information.
He is less technically inclined
He read a prompt asking if he wanted to remove his system and said yes
Then complained about it
To be fair it was caused by installing steam. Why System76 didn't test that I don't know.
Its partial fault on all sides that added up.
Ubuntu shipped with that issue for some time and fixed it after some time.
Pop os iso on the download page contained it.
The package came from ubuntu but this issue was not visible since up to date pop os does not have this issue. Only the version in iso. So Pop os too made some mistake.
Linus tried to install steam. The installer does not allow removing necessary packages. He tried to install anyway ignoring all warnings, in cli.
It says if you are so sure, type "Yes, Do as I say!" with all cases and punctuation correct. Why would you be required to type a very specific phrase to install steam? Its a clear warning for confirmation. He too makes mistake by ignoring all warnings.
Not to blame anyone but all of them did partial mistake that added up
They forgot that heart transplant requires replacing the removed heart with another one and then connecting the blood vessels before closing up.
You can't just take it out and say "I'll put in another one after dinner"
He uninstalled systemd, now his computer is not doing systemd things anymore by his retelling. Seems like it worked fine. Yet he asks for a solution of a problem. Maybe he needs to state the problem.
Nah, more like deleting explorer.exe.
There's isn't really a Windows equivalent for this, as Windows doesn't give you control on this level.
It'd be as if you could delete services.msc but also the runner behind it.
I did delete explorer.exe on an earlier iteration of Windows (possibly 98SE). I've just restored it with Windows Commander (now TCMD).
But system32 contains the NT kernel as well, so that's worse. Uninstalling your init system on a Linux distro still leaves you with single user mode. You could probably reinstall an init system from there.
System32 holds the 64-bit stuff and SysWOW64 holds the 32-bit stuff. This makes complete and total sense.
On Debian you can actually change init systems. Don't know how hard it is and you are probably meant to install a new one after removing systemd, but it is possible at least.
I mean, it can work out if he installs an alternative init & rc and a wifi-manager first. And then recreates initrd. Maybe needs to migrate some dns stuff too.
I mean if you've never seen or used a car before, and someone from a position of relative authority or trust gave you a very convincing argument that a particular part that you don't understand is easy to remove and you'll benefit from it...
Yeah it's pretty reasonable that the average person might shoot themselves in the foot by letting them remove that part (tell them a command to run).
Windows hss supported slashes in both directions for a very long time. I almost exclusively use forward slashes to reduce mental load when switching between OSes.
Lol this reminds me of a time when I had KDE desktop environment installed on vanilla ubuntu. I thought I didn't really need ubuntu's default desktop environment and decided to 'purge' it. I quickly realized my f up when it deleted so many packages and ui started to act weird, I copied the shell's output to a file just incase, and sure enough I couldn't login with ui on next reboot. I was somehow able to login to shell and with some awk magic I was able to parse the text file to get all the packages I deleted and lo and behold everything worked just fine. Linux let's you f'up your OS but it also let's you fix it, it's just a skill issue.
Linux let's you f'up your OS but it also let's you fix it, it's just a skill issue.
Yeah, there's something about Linux that makes me feel like if something breaks in it, the only reason I can't fix it personally is because I lack the skills to fix the problem. Just feels nice, really.
If your installing, or deleting something and your package manager is modifying more then a few packages: stop, read and think about what your about to do.
I updated my sources.list to something non-existing at some point and run sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove once and it also basically uninstalled everything. But that didn't even matter, I popped in a recovery disk and could reinstall everything. Pretty great to be able to do all that with Linux, fuck everything up in an instant but after a few hours everything is back again
Well you could have saved those hours if you were on one of those restrictive OSs. I mean why would anyone even wanna do that? /s
I was curious too, so I tried it in a virtual machine
It half installed sysvinit, systemd failed to get fully removed, and apt gave up due to too many post-install errors
The reboot threw me into an init that asked for me to specify the runlevel (since there wasn’t anything in init.d)
I guess they didn’t understand the difference between that question and a logged in shell
My guess before trying it was that they somehow got stuck in Grub’s shell
Yeah i remember debian installs sysvinit if you apt remove systemd and installs systemd if you apt remove sysvinit
haha why does debian bother adding this rule if the system will be left in broken state anyway
(As the tester above) It is a broken state
It failed to install the initscripts package because apt bailed out
apt —fix-broken install got you a little closer, but the screenshot didn’t say they tried that
My bet is this worked when systemd was first introduced, but since there’s not much use for it now, and sysvinit is deprecated, it just doesn’t accidentally work anymore
You can’t - it’s just asking what runlevel to launch, and there are no files for any runlevel
You’d need to add init=/bin/sh through grub at that point
Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.
Gotta love this linux rhetoric, man! It's so out there.
I don't want to be in control of starting up all the services during boot.
I want the init system to do that.
You don't want it until something fails. SystemD often doesn't let you log in to fix it. It just shows a "infinitely bouncing asterisk" and hopes it will magically get better.
For real though, if you break ANYTHING in Linux, it can probably be repaired through live image on your flash drive.
I use BTRFS, and it randomly decided to corrupt like half of the system packages on my system after an update, but all I had to do to fix it was boot into a live environment and run a command to reinstall everything on my system. :P
Using btrfs for past 6 months in my kde environment, doesn't encountered any problem like this. Pretty stable
It's only really a problem if I try upgrading while low on space and also having disk compression enabled
Is it possible to chroot from a livedisk and reinstall systemd from that? I'd imagine the Internet connection would work just fine.
You know that Linux has protection against rm -rf / since a few years ?
Guess it's a sign that Linus got milder on the way, growing old :-) And the terrible BOFH joke of this grew old and boring as well. Gotta take care about new Linux users.
Arch only officially supporting systemd despite being the "fuck around and do what you want" distro is pretty weird now that I think about it.
I think I would have preferred sudo apt-get remove --purge systemd
Yeah, some old habits never die.
